Electronic commerce has become increasingly popular with consumers as the accessibility and ease of placing orders online or via the Internet continues to improve. At the same time, online retailers have continued to expand the availability of products and items available for purchase online or via the Internet to thousands, or even millions, of products. As a result, consumers may choose from an unprecedented variety of products or other items without leaving the home. In order to offer this wide selection of products, some electronic commerce retailers maintain numerous strategically placed fulfillment centers or other physical storage facilities that store products. After a consumer has placed an order for a product online or via the Internet, an order is received at the storage facility, and the product is shipped from the storage facility to the consumer.
However, due to physical limitations, a single storage facility typically cannot store every item that is offered for sale by some large electronic commerce retailers. As a result, in instances in which a customer orders multiple items, the retailer may be unable to fulfill the customer's order from inventory stocked in a single storage facility, and the retailer may need to ship different products included in the same order to the consumer from different storage facilities. This scenario in sometimes referred to as a “split order” because a single, multi-item order must be fulfilled by multiple shipments to the consumer. Because the popularity of shopping online or via the Internet and the number of products made available through electronic commerce is expected to increase in the near future, the issues of split orders will continue to be a challenge for online retailers.